About

Holding our gentle bees with my (now – sadly – ex) hive partner, Emma Tennant. I’m on the left, Emma’s on the right. Emma also has a blog at missapismellifera.com.

I have recently relocated to Truro in Cornwall from Ealing, west London. I have a couple of hives in Cornwall, one of which is a swarm I captured and one which I bought from a local beekeeper. From 2008 until August 2017 I kept bees in the Ealing Beekeepers Association’s apiary in Perivale, sharing hives with the lovely Emma. This blog was started as a record for myself of my various beekeeping related tribulations and occasional successes.

In 2012 I started taking the British Beekeeping Association (BBKA)’s beekeeping exam modules and so far have passed Module 1 (Honey bee Management), Module 2 (Honey bee Products and Forage), Module 3 (Honey bee Pests, Diseases and Poisoning) and Module 6 (Honey bee Behaviour). It has been fun learning more about bees. Module 5 on Biology will probably be next!

I have started a Pinterest board called Bee fun, which has lots of photos of solitary bee hotels and gorgeous bees from around the world, some of which are green and shiny.

Anyone wanting official information and advice on how to keep bees in Britain should visit the BBKA website: www.bbka.org.uk and should probably not do anything they read here!

Emily Scott

p.s. here’s a few more photos…

My son, Tommy, at the Ealing association apiary

Me at an open day on Northfields Allotments in Ealing, where I kept bees for a little while.

Me at the Ealing association’s apiary

Watching an inspection during a Bee Health Day held by the National Bee Unit. Copyright Emma Maund.

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56 Responses to About

Emily, You posted a comment on my blog yesterday. Here’s another piece I wrote about beekeeping, in case you’d like to read it. Thanks for taking a peek and like I said in my response to your comment–if the day comes when I can start a hive or two, I will follow your blog. Until then, I hope to check in periodically. Keep up the heart work!

My name is Liz and I’m contacting you from Silver River Productions, a TV company based in London. We are currently in production for a BBC2 primetime gardening show ‘The Big Allotment Challenge.’

The series follows a handful of talented amateur kitchen gardeners as they transform a plot of earth in our walled garden into a patch of beauty and reveal all the wonderful possibilities that can be unlocked from allotment growing.

We are looking for contestants to feature in the series, those who have the skill and dedication and who could dig their way to victory and be crowned the winner of ‘The Big Allotment Challenge.’ People who can cultivate the perfect carrot, make their green tomatoes into tasty chutney and turn their dahlias and sweet peas into floral arrangements.

So whether you’re an allotmenteer, a city living window box grower, or a gardening enthusiast, we want to hear from you. We are coming to the end of our application process so email grow@silverriver.tv for an application form today!

Hi Sara, great to have such a local visitor! I have probably met or at least seen you down at the apiary then. Congrats on doing your basic assessment. Have started following your blog and will look forward to hearing what your bees and hens get up to 🙂

Great blog! Sadly there isn’t room in our garden for bees (and being in Central London, the neighbours would probably complain!), so I’ll just have to keep informed about it through your own experiences. 🙂

Thanks! I’ve met a few people in central London recently who would like to keep bees but can’t find anywhere to do it. I haven’t got room in my little garden either, plus it’s shared with my neighbour and her dog, so I’m very lucky to be able to keep them in the Ealing apiary.

Hi Emily,
thanks for all the info and adventures you have written on this blog, I can’t wait to have the time to read your posts more thoroughly. Thanks for the advice on bees over at mine, I realize that I am very very inexperienced and I am tentatively feeling my way along at the moment, so any info I can get is brilliant. I love your snowy English winter photos especially.

Emily- Thanks for stopping by honeyshesakeeper yesterday, I’m excited to follow a fellow ‘small framed female beekeeper’. Hope we both come into some successes during this crazy and fun journey! Easter

Hi Emily, Great bee blog! I thought you might be interested in tuning in to and spreading the buzz about this live online bee broadcast in support of The Great Bee Count (the American bee census), this Sat. Aug. 11. You can tune-in to hear interviews with bee experts and to chat with other bee lovers. http://www.yourgardenshow.com/bees

Thanks Rachel, looking forward to reading more of your posts about dormice and other creatures! There should be a Kent association which you could join to find out more, the local associations usually run beginners courses and let you get some practical experience opening hives.

The BBA program is awesome! Here in Canada we only have a Master Beekeeper course which in my province only runs every two years. The British program seems more thorough, and more aimed at drawing in younger, new beekeepers. Well done.

Great blog! I am looking forward to learning more about bees through reading your blog posts. We have a small garden and plant bee-friendly flowers to encourage bees. We had lots of different types of bees last year buzzing round the sage, rosemary and giant pink poppies. I would like to be able to tell the difference in the types of bee that visit – objective for 2013!

I enjoyed your blog Emily. One of my projects when I retired was to keep bees as I have always liked them and have helped some beekeepers over the years. Living in West London as you do, you won’t guess why, now that I am retired, I don’t keep any. The reason in that I live and garden in a remote area on Ontario, Canada, next to a National Park where there are quite a few black bears. In summer the garden is part of the territory of a female bear (the park people have given her a name: Ruthy) who comes to check the compost heap once in a while. She is harmless and afraid of people, but a hive would be a strong magnet and Ruthy would soon destroy it.
I hope you have a good honey season in 2013!

Thanks Alain, great to have a visitor from Canada. London beekeepers have many obstacles to deal with, but nothing as big as bears! I’m jealous of all the wildlife watching opportunities you must have. I hear some Canadian beekeepers use electric fences to deter bears, but arranging that must be quite an effort.

I was recently nominated for a Super Sweet Blogger Award, and one of the conditions of accepting is in turn to nominate other bloggers for the award. Your blog very naturally came to mind. 🙂 You’re not obliged to accept, of course (it’s a bit of work, but also a bit of fun) but if you do, you get to answer five Super Sweet questions (following), copy and paste the logo into your blog post, and nominate and notify a baker’s dozen other bloggers for the award. In any case, thank you for your wonderful posts, and keep up the good work!

Emily, can you drop me an email? We have been trying to figure out best wintering practices for our area (the Pacific Northwest), which has a climate similar to yours…largely wet and chilly winters with midwinter dips below freezing, little snow. Is there any official position in England on how best to set up colonies for the winter ie. wrapping and ventilating practices? Right now we are going on hunches, with no one having done any research into the topic!
Many thanks, Janet

Hello – I am a musician / composer and just came out with my first CD. On it are two of my compositions about bees. I have written 9 tunes about the life of bees. I would like my next CD to be the complete Bee Suite And thought I might be able to get some feedback from your readers about the two tunes I have already recorded. May I email you the mp3 links with a brief description of the songs for possible submission?

Hi Emily.
You have a wonderful blog, filled with very interesting content.
We are embarking on a new project to site 1000 hive across Sussex, then we want to move on to Surrey and Kent. We know this is a bold project, so we will start with Sussex. I wondered if you would feature the project on your blog?

My name’s Matt, and I’m part of the Waltons blog team. We’ve been reading a lot of beekeeping blogs lately, and yours does stand out among the crowd.

In fact, we liked your blog so much we’ve featured it in our new ’10 brilliant beekeeper’s blogs’ round-up which we’re publishing very soon.

You’re in good company. All the featured bloggers here are highly dedicated, and the common theme I’ve found with you all is your ingenuity when it comes to working with bees, and sharing that with the wider world.

I hope it’s ok to use the picture of you on this page (I think it’s great) – but if there’s a better one you prefer, please do let me know.

I’ll be sure to let you know when the post goes live.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments – it’s always good to hear back from our featured bloggers.

Thanks for your speedy reply! Well, the dynamic beekeeping blogging duo that you two are – your hive partner will hopefully also be featuring in our round-up!

However, your bee suit selfie is too good not to use – so we’ll go with that one.

We’d love it if you had a read when the post goes live, do you have an email address we can contact you on to notify you when it’s live on the site? If so, and you don’t want to make it public on here, just drop me a line at blog@waltons.co.uk – alternatively I could message you on here when it’s up on the site?

Hi Emily, I’m the editor of Cornwall Today magazine. Would you be interested in appearing in our Moving Story section, for people who have relocated to the county? You sound like you have an interesting tale to tell. I’m on 01872 247258 or at knewton@cornwalltoday.co.uk. Kirstie